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THE FANTASTIC INDIA-PAKISTAN BATTLE
Or the Future of the Past in South Asia

Ashis Nandy

INDIA'S PAKISTAN

When the Bangladesh war created a new state to the east of India in 1971,
it ended Pakistan's unique status as a country in two parts, separated
by one thousand miles of hostile India. Before the war, the late Sisir
Gupta, scholar and hard-eyed Indian diplomat, used to claim that the crisis
of Pakistan's identity was mirrored in the inability of Pakistani children
to even draw the map of their country without drawing India. Twenty-five
years after the event, Indians have now proved the cultural unity of the
subcontinent by successfully redefining their country in such terms that
even adult Indians cannot define India without involving Pakistan in that
self-definition.

Pakistan has a history and a geography. Beyond them, shaping India's
imagination of her neighbour in elemental ways, is the myth of Pakistan.
This myth transcends Pakistan's empirical and geopolitical status. It
cannot be subsumed under rubrics such as defence studies, class analysis,
political history, and development economics. That mythic Pakistan is
not even made in Pakistan. It originates in India and dominates India's
public life, though it is also sometimes exported or smuggled into Pakistan.
When it enters Pakistan, it becomes a deadly bond between the two countries.
For the myth is not obediently mythic; it shapes behaviour and policy.
People die and kill for it. To use a cliché, if the Pakistani state
does not conform to the myth, some Indians will certainly invent a new
nation-state to do so.

Pakistan is the name of a country to the north-west of India, carved
out of the Muslim majority provinces of British India. It has survived
for nearly fifty years, to intermittently haunt the Indian state and army.
About twenty-five years ago Pakistan shrunk to less than half its original
size, when Bangladesh was born. India played an important part in that
shrinkage. But few Indians believe that the bisection taught Pakistan
any lesson or reduced its power an iota. Pakistan, they believe, is exactly
what it was when it started life as a new nation. Most Indians, therefore,
react to Pakistan as if it was the Pakistan of 1947.

For the Indian state, therefore, Pakistan has retained its parity and
remained a genuine counter-player. Few Indian state functionaries think
of Pakistan as anything but superior to India in its ability to make mischief
or subvert neighbouring states. This is no mean achievement, given that
Pakistan is one-eighth the size of India, that even after spending nearly
6 per cent of its GDP on defence-as compared to India's 2.5 per cent -its
army is about one-third the size of the Indian army, that the country
has its own ethnic problems and separatist movements, and Pakistanis seem
more unsure about Pakistan's sustainability than Indians are about India's.

Even for many highly educated, urbane, middle-class Indians, what matters
is that Pakistan is full of Muslims, most of them from north-west India
and belonging to the `martial races'. India's north-west includes Punjab
and that makes it worse. Secularism is all right, even commendable, but
rationality demands that one recognises Muslims to be hot-headed, tough,
masculine, anti-democratic and prone to fundamentalism. More so if they
happen to be from the north. One must handle them firmly to protect progress
and democracy and to ensure that they get stewed in the global melting
pot to become atomised, law-abiding citizens of a proper modern state?

At this plane, Pakistan is what India does not want to be; indeed, it
is what India's modern élite would hate to be. This bonding in
hate, fifty years after the division of India into two nation-states,
is growing. As India becomes more of a modern nation-state, Pakistan for
it becomes both a double and the final rejected self. The next-door neighbour
now arouses deep anxieties not merely in Hindu nationalist formations
like the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, the Bharatiya Janata Party and
the Shiv Sena, but also in Indian liberals and leftists. For them, too,
Pakistan is the ultimate symbol of irrationality and fanaticism.

Jawaharlal Nehru, we are told, expected Pakistan to collapse within months
in 1947. A theocratic state, he thought, could not survive in the contemporary
world. (Pakistan always looks a theocratic state to the Indian élite,
never as a nation-state created by its modernising middle classes, working
with a vague pan-Islamic fervour or an instrumental concept of Islam.)
Pakistan, Nehru's reading of world history presumably went, had to be
an aberration in history, brought about by a few ambitious nuts who had
successfully mobilised the atavistic sentiments of a section of some South
Asians. Strictly speaking, the reading is no different from that of the
young historian Ayesha Jalal or the respected jurist H. M. Seervai. Only
Nehru believed that the stupidity and ambition were concentrated in the
leaders of the Muslim League; the other two believe that these qualities
were concentrated in the Indian National Congress.
Nation-states in our times, however, have been sturdy entities. In the
present world system, they have a logic that transcends the naive social
evolutionism of Nehru. Pakistan has survived not only as an `unreasonably'
stable nation-state, to trust the Indian policy makers and the leaders
of India's main political parties, it has survived to become the equal
of India. Today the two national security states stand face to face, more
equal that ever. For India's efforts to prove, once for all, its military
superiority by exploding a `peaceful' nuclear device in 1973, has misfired.
Pakistan in its unending search for parity, has acquired nuclear capability
to neutralise India's one-up-manship. This new parity, gifted to Pakistan
by India's super-patriots and the international arms bazaar, is going
to be a permanent fixture, neutralising the three-to-one superiority India
reportedly has in conventional arms.

Is this cultivated nuclear equality unintended? Or does the Indian nation-state,
to complete its self-definition, need a powerful, hostile Pakistan as
its hated but valued double? Or is the fantasised Pakistan an essential
technology, for modern Indians, to complete the conversion of the Indian
civilisation to a standard, nineteenth-century the nation-state? From
where has Pakistan got this magical strength to take on a country eight
times its size? Do Indians secretly believe what General Yahya Khan openly
claimed-that each Pakistani soldier is equal to ten Indian? Is it all
a matter of American military aid and the Indian state's softness, the
ignominy that Professor Gunnar Myrdal so compassionately diagnosed in
the 1960s and left the Indian élite to live with?

One part of the answer lies in the shared memories of Pakistan's separation
from India. These memories prompt every modern Indian to mutter under
his or her breath about Pakistan: `There goes, but for the grace of God,
India.' But with it also goes the wistful belief that they should have
been little more like the Pakistanis, at least in international relations
and cricket.

That ambivalence comes from two pivotal imageries: First, Pakistan is
seen as a product of the conspiracy between India's erstwhile British
rulers pursuing a `divide and rule' policy and the religion-based parties
in the region. Pakistan at this plane is seen as an illegitimate child
of the West. The `killer instinct' imputed to it comes partly from this.
A bastard of the West is, everything said, half-western and has to be
better in wily statecraft than the natives.

That Islam is a Semitic creed and that most Pakistanis are Punjabis feed
this imagery. The West might be phobic about Islam and Pakistanis may
be suspicious of the West but, for modern Indians, Pakistan cannot but
remain a natural ally of the West. They love to see Islam, even South
Asian Islam, as closer to European Christianity than to Hinduism. Every
modern reform movement in Hinduism, from Brahmoism to Arya Samaj, has
tried to make Hinduism more Semitic and incorporate within it elements
of Islam? And Punjabis, as is well known on both sides of the border,
are pushy, martial, avaricious, and amoral at the same time. A country
full of Muslims is bad enough, but a country full of Punjabi Muslims can
only be considered a conspiracy against decent politics.

Hence the frequent inability of the Indian rulers to distinguish the
Pakistani people-theoretically, misguided Indians who made a wrong choice
in 1947-from the Pakistani government, led by a series of military or,
as it looks from this side of the border, theocratic regimes. The Pakistani
disinclination to be ruled by the army or by the mullahs can be taken
seriously by all countries in the world except India. Hence, few Indians
have seriously surveyed the political support-base of Islamic parties
and formations in Pakistan, their electoral performance, and the resistance
they have faced. The success of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan is
taken for granted.

Second, Pakistan has to be a successful conspirator against India, because
religion, culture and state in Pakistan are seen to constitute a symbiotic
triad. The symbiosis explains, to the satisfaction of many Indians, Pakistan's
fanaticism and the super-human efficiency of its state. This symbiosis
has been a goal of modern Indians since the last century and they feel
they have not succeeded in it, thanks to the obstinate inertia of the
ordinary Hindus and the `soft', non-martial, fuzzy-ended `effeminacy'
their religion inculcates in them. Therefore, the omniscience imputed
to the agencies of the Pakistani state is matched by the innocence attributed
to their Indian counterparts. The Pakistani Army's intelligence wing,
the Inter-Services Intelligence, for instance, has acquired in India a
mythic stature as a villain that puts to shame the boisterous villains
in the popular Bombay films. In comparison, the Indian intelligence agency,
the Research and Analysis Wing, is perceived as a set of bungling, politics-afflicted
innocents controlled by civilians. Everything said, the staff in the ISI
are seen as trained by the CIA; those in RAW are seen as either home-spun
or trained by the miserable NKVD.

The obverse of that perception is the constant demand for more masculine,
tough statecraft from the Indians and pleas to match the militarisation
of the Pakistani society by building a garrison state in India. The fear
of separatism everywhere, the tendency to see all demands for decentralisation
as a conspiracy against Indian unity, the panicky response to criticisms
of state violence by human rights groups-they all are indicators of a
concept of a state critically shaped by Pakistan. So much so that it is
possible to visualise a time when the Indian state will only mirror the
Pakistani-state-as-fantasised-by-the-Indian-élite.

Pakistan is many things to many people. But the mythic Pakistan I am
talking about is, above all, a definer of Indianness. It is a means of
self-analysis and self-intervention. If Mother India can be put on an
analytic couch, the enterprising psychoanalyst who does so will not miss
her schizoid personality and the mix of paranoia and admiration with which
some of her selves look at each other. That one of these selves is identified
with Pakistan is now part of South Asia's psychological landscape. In
the dynamics of that self lie crucial clues to the nature of the Indian
nation-state.

II PAKISTAN''S INDIA

Pakistan's India, the image of India Pakistan lives with, is also mostly
Pakistan's own. It has almost nothing to do with what India is or might
have been. It tells us what Pakistan is, feels it should be, or could
have been.
Pakistan's India has two selves. The source of one is the official ideology
of the Pakistani state; official Pakistan likes to believe it to be the
only India that counts. The other is a disowned India; even Pakistani
ideologues carry it in their veins, though many of them would deny that
vehemently. That disowned India is also a mythic entity that defines Pakistan's
boundaries and origins, loves and hates, past and future, its very core.

The official India of Pakistan-the India that looks like a pure product
of Pakistani propaganda to many-is actually a desperate defence against
facing the unofficial India that Pakistanis carry within themselves. That
unofficial India contaminates and subverts Pakistan every day. It subverts
not in the way the many Pakistanis fear being subverted-through political
deceit or treachery or through the armed might of its larger neighbour-but
in the way Sigmund Freud talked of the return of the unconscious to subvert
our self-image as rational, normal, sane human beings.

No wily Indian politician scheming to destroy Pakistan could do worse.
For the most the clever, dhoti-clad Indian politician can do is to try
to wreck Pakistan through inspired statecraft and military adventure,
against both of which Pakistan has built excellent defences in the last
fifty years. Whereas the latent India that haunts Pakistan has no devious
political leader to guide its destiny and no army to back it up. It is
entirely a home-made Pakistani product.
That haunting, strangely seductive India Pakistanis cannot share with
any other country; they have to fight that apparition alone. Paradoxically,
they can sometimes share it with Indians, who also have now begun to live
with a home-made ghost called Pakistan.

The manifest India of Pakistan-to judge by Pakistan's official ideology,
mainstream historical scholarship, school and college texts, and the language
of propaganda used by Pakistani media-has some clear features. I state
them in the form of a three propositions. First, India is led by a westernised,
highly professional, upper-caste, Hindu élite who, taking advantage
of their early modernisation, began to dominate the subcontinent, much
before the simple, lion-hearted, Kiplinesque Gungadins-also known as the
South Asian Muslims-woke up to it. The élite even had, the self-construction
of Pakistan goes, subtly changed the rules of the game in the 1920s under
the leadership of the likes of M. K. Gandhi--by introducing symbols and
idiom from the Hindu worldview and by refusing to grant Muslims parity
with the Hindus, which the Muslims deserved for being the subcontinent's
largest minority and erstwhile rulers. It was thus that the Hindu élite
ensconced in the Indian National Congress prepared the ground for the
creation of Pakistan. For Pakistan, according to the underside of its
official history, is the only country in the world to have come into being
reluctantly-as a response to the chicanery of the Hindu élite of
undivided India. An authentic anti-imperialist and an important leader
of the Congress, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, saw through the game, left the party,
and decided to lead the Pakistan movement. Being a westernised professional
lawyer, and a Gujarati Bania to boot, Jinnah could be a perfect foil for
the other Gujarati Bania who was going places with his bogus slogans of
non-violence, soul force and moral politics, his unending fasts and tiresome
counter-modernism.

Defeated in its own game, the Hindu upper-caste élite gulped the
idea of partition of India as a political ploy but continued to have designs
on the infant Pakistani state. Not only during the 1971 war but subsequently
too, India has been entirely responsible for Pakistan's ethnic problems.
In addition, what the Brahminic élite could not do to the bulk
of Indian Muslims in pre-partition days, it has now done to India's supine
Muslim minority and, for that matter, to all other minorities.
Second, Pakistan is an Islamic state and an Islamic state should not,
Pakistan believes, be preoccupied with its Indian past, pre-Islamic or
otherwise. For over-concern with that past can only detract from one's
Islamic heritage and the solidarity of the Muslims that constitutes the
Pakistani nation-state. Pakistan's history should begin neither with the
Indus valley civilisation nor with the entry of Islam into India at a
time when India's ruling élite was still predominantly Hindu, that
is, when Islam in India was not backed by state power. Pakistan's history
must begin with the West Asian invaders of India who not only gave Indian
Islam a new political and military edge, but also brought along with them
a huge majority of the ancestors of the South Asian Muslims. The South
Asian Muslims, therefore, are basically an exogenous ruling élite
who have found in Pakistan a social and political status appropriate to
their true self. It is this status that India's Hindu rulers grudge. The
Muslims who do not fit this self-image are irrelevant and can be safely
forgotten.

Not only the distant past but much of India's anti-colonial struggle-except
probably the rebellion in 1857-is irrelevant to Pakistan, for the struggle
sought to bypass the Indian Muslims. Many Hindu leaders of the struggle,
the ideologues of Pakistan believe, were dedicated enemies of the Muslims
because they wanted to inherit the mantle of the Raj in its entirety,
even though representing only the sectional interests of the Hindus.

Third, Muslims and other minorities in present-day India are not only
oppressed, the leaders they have thrown up are servitors of the Hindu
élite who rule India with an iron hand. Official Pakistan believes
that the stridency towards Pakistan displayed by many Muslim leaders of
India can be traced to their political ambitions; they want to be more
loyal than the king to India's Hindu state, for reasons of personal greed
or ambition.

Of course, Pakistan, the declared home of South Asian Muslims, will not
like to accept all the Muslims in India, even if they were willing to
migrate. For that would be the end of Pakistan. On the other hand, the
fact that both India and Bangladesh have as large number of Muslims as
Pakistan is a statistical artifact for many Pakistanis. For them, the
Muslims stay in India under duress and Bangladesh is merely an Indian
concoction and a trickery of history. The Indian Muslims are poor and
oppressed, though their Islam is no worse than that of Pakistan; the Bangladeshi
Muslims are not only poor; they are fish-eating, Bengali-speaking, non-martial,
quasi-Muslims whose numerical strength is a Malthusian artifact. Ideally,
India should be officially a Hindu state and the Indian rulers should
shed the pretence of running a multi-ethnic state, to justify post facto
the creation of Pakistan. For Pakistan still desperately craves to represent
the interests of all South Asian Muslims, including the Muslims of India
and Bangladesh. The size and political clout of India's Muslim community
discomfits Pakistan's rulers. Because granting intrinsic legitimacy to
the politics of Indian Muslims-and that of the Bangladeshi Muslims-means
recognising that Pakistan is only one among the three major players in
the region's Muslim politics and involves seeking sanction from the Muslims
of India and Bangladesh before making claims in the name of Islam in this
part of the world.

Underlying these components in the official ideology of the Pakistani
state-which already makes Pakistan an atypical ideological state in that
it depends so heavily on India to define itself-is the unofficial culture
of the Pakistani state. That unofficial culture involves India in an entirely
different way.

First, Pakistan was built as a home of South Asian Muslims, against the
proposal for a multi-ethnic society that looked, rightly or wrongly, to
most of the subcontinent's westernised Muslim élite, like a plan
to create a majoritarian nation-state dominated by the Hindus. Anti-Hindu
sentiments therefore have to be an ingredient of the ideology of Pakistan.
Pakistan, however, is a nation-state and, like all nation-states, uncomfortable
with the demands of an ideological state. (For instance, it likes to be
in good terms with Nepal. The fear of big brother India brings them together
but, for both, it is not a happy exposure. Pakistanis discover a Hindu
state with whom they are forced to be friendly; the Nepalese, living in
the world's only Hindu kingdom, discover a peculiar ally which claims
to hate a central plank of Nepal's cultural self.)

Also, thanks to the large-scale violence in 1946-47 and the separation
of Bangladesh, anti-Hindu themes have increasingly become an odd, anachronistic
presence in Pakistan's national ideology. Many young Pakistanis, who have
not even seen many Hindus, do not find the themes evocative, despite being
brought up on a steady diet of anti-Hindu texts. That only increases the
stridency and bitterness in official Pakistan, for it has come to feel
in recent years that the younger generation in Pakistan is not adequately
patriotic or aware of the sacrifices made for Pakistan by the older generation
of Pakistanis.
Second, everyone in Pakistan suspects, even those who claim otherwise,
that a huge majority of the South Asian Muslims have no genuine claim
to West Asian ancestry. Their forefathers were converted from Hinduism
or Buddhism and their `peripheral' Islam is not a learnt behaviour but
an inherited culture. The real fear is of drowning in the morass called
Hindu cultural order as other religions and even prophetic creeds have
sometimes done or being fitted within its hierarchical order, from which
Islam has often been an escape for important sections of South Asians.
This fear might or might not have been vaguely strengthened by certain
similarities between Hinduism and pre-Islamic Arab faiths that Islam fought
in its earliest years.

Third, by conceptualising Hinduism as a negation of Islam, the Pakistani
state is forced to take a position on South Asian Islam, which has interacted
over the centuries with other faiths, especially Hinduism, influencing
them and being influenced by them. South Asian Islam cannot but look to
the ideologues of Pakistan a deviant, half-baked form of Islam that has
strayed from the straight, narrow path of `authentic' Islam practised
in West Asia. The very distinctiveness of South Asian Islam, cultural
and social, is seen as its liability, as the final proof that it has been
influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism. Virtually every Islamic reform movement
in South and South-East Asia has vended the idea of a genuine Islam and
the myriad tropical varieties of Islam as essentially flawed. Gradually
the largest Muslim communities in the world-Indonesia, India, Bangladesh,
Pakistan and Malaysia, which among themselves constitute a decisive majority
of the global Islamic community-have been reclassified during the last
hundred years as the abodes of peripheral Islam where dumb apprentice-believers
of Islam perpetually wait to be retooled into text-book versions of Muslims.

Fearful of the egalitarian thrust of Islam and its emphasis on an unmediated
relationship between the believer and divinity, this particular form of
reformism has also led to the development of an ornate structure of theological
justifications for authoritarian regimes that ambitious despots find very
soothing. Pakistan's India is an adjunct to this set of justifications.
Pakistanis may not like it, but their India comes closest to the India
of the Hindu nationalists. What the Pakistani élite imagine India
to be, the Hindu nationalist want India to be. In the India that these
dedicated enemies have co-authored, there is the same pathetic masculinity
strivings, the same uncritical acceptance of the principles of the modern
state and nationality, the same contempt towards the ordinary citizen
and ordinary believers.

There is, however, one important difference. The criteria used by official
Pakistan to conjure up its India are, by the standard of the Hindu nationalists,
almost entirely Hindu. Whereas the criteria used by the Hindu nationalists
to define their ideal India are, as paradoxically, close to the ones the
ideologues of Pakistan consider truly Islamic. Both sets include elements
with which the westernised middle classes in South Asia feel at home.

Fourth, Pakistan wants India to leave it alone and accept the partition
of India, but Pakistan cannot accept as genuine an India that leaves it
alone and accepts partition. India, to qualify as India for Pakistanis,
must interfere in and try to subvert the Pakistani state. For Pakistan
needs India to be its hostile but prized audience which, after trying
out all its dirty tricks, will have to admit someday that Pakistan has
made it, that Pakistan is not what the Pakistanis themselves secretly
suspect it to be. That acceptance by India and, by implication, the Hindus
is even more important for the ideologues of Pakistan than what the common
run of Pakistani citizens think of Pakistan. For, everything said, India
is the exiled self of Pakistan, by exteriorising and territorialising
which Pakistan has built its identity and it remains, fifty years after
its creation, the final measure of the worth of Pakistan.

III THE FUTURE OF THE PAST

This story is not concerned with history; it is concerned with the future
of `reconstructed' pasts, with the myths that frame the fate of South
Asia as it enters the twenty-first century. It is actually a story which
has many of the ingredients that constitute an epic--a cast of millions,
memories of wars and an exodus that have taken the toll of someone near
to virtually everyone, and anger over lost or stolen patrimonies. Above
all, to please literary theorist D. R. Nagaraj's concept of an epic, it
has two antagonistic sides that are intimately related to each other through
kinship and shared but often-disowned memories--like the Pandavas and
the Kauravas in the Mahabharata. The only concession made to contemporary
times is that both sides believe themselves to the wronged Pandavas and
other side to be the ungodly Kauravas; yet each is convinced, as upholders
of virtue, that they must retain a clandestine Kaurava self to ensure
final victory of justice and truth.

Nation-states in South Asia, Ziauddin Sardar argues, are fictitious entities.
Indian and Pakistani nationalism, too, is `an artifact,: a fabrication
that is treated and enforced as though of the natural universe.' But millions
have been uprooted and much blood has already been shed for these entities.
Fictions do kill in our times. What gives poignancy to that suffering
is that all of it might have been a waste, though it might have consolidated
two nation-states and satisfied a lost generation brought up to view the
nation-state as the key to survival in the contemporary world.

Much of the ethnic violence-particularly the venom that has come to characterise
it in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka-has sprung not from any distance among
communities or from clashing civilisations, but from proximity and fear
of one's disowned selves. As in the cases of the Hutus and the Tutsis,
the Bosnians and the Serbs, South Asian ethnic and religious violence,
too, can be identified as a classic instance of what Sigmund Freud might
have called a desperate, panicky `turning against the self' as a means
of exorcising the feared Other. That attempted exorcism, even at the cost
of self-annihilation, is becoming in South Asia the marker of a nihilistic
affirmation of one's cultural selfhood. Strangely, that affirmation has
come at a time when cultures are under attack not from one's neighbours
but from more impersonal forces of global cultural unification and the
loss of the life-support systems that once sustained traditional identities.
This is tragic, for there are signs that the coming century may belong
not to the nation-states or to public consciousness built around nation-states,
but to other kinds of aggregates organised around cultures and civilisations,
including those previously marginalised. These aggregates will face formidable
challenges from other non-state actors, such as multinational corporations
and transnational economic institutions, but these corporations and institutions
will have even less to do with the present order of nation-states. South
Asia among all the regions of the world seem least prepared to face that
situation. I remember economist Rahman Sobhan once predicting that the
seven states in the region will walk like so many ghosts in the global
corridors of power with none interested either in their plight or mutual
bickering.

It is one of the clichés of contemporary sociology of science
that, in modern science, major new discoveries or changes in cosmology
are brought about not by empirical data or spectacular changes of heart
in important scientists moved by reason, but by the death and retirement
of the older generation of scientists. As we near the end of this particularly
violent century, perhaps we should pin our hopes on an younger generation
of South Asians less conditioned or brainwashed by the nineteenth-century
European worldview and its obsessive preoccupation with the state. They
will, I am confident, look at the organisational principles of their societies
less blinkered by nineteenth-century western scholarship and rediscover
that the South Asian societies are woven not around the state, but around
their plural cultures and pluri-cultural identities. They will also discover,
if I might use that paradoxical expression for a region that has not yet
been massified, the grandeur of the humble, everyday life of their peoples
and their little cultures. It is unlikely that I shall live to see that
day, but I am consoled by the thought that I belong to a generation of
South Asian scholars whose demise can only hasten the end of the present
phase of self-hatred and attempts to live out some other culture's history.